Genetically Modified crops
The principle of justice
1.20 Behind both the balancing of the welfare of different people and groups, and the balancing of their competing rights, lie ideas of justice. When considering the welfare interests or competing rights of individuals, groups, industry or the state, we try to strike a fair balance or seek a just outcome. For example, if protecting the rights of consumers by providing adequate labelling was very expensive and was generally agreed to do nothing to prevent harm, most people would say that upholding the right to know would not be worth the loss of value to producers, particularly if the producers were poor. Conversely, if informative but inexpensive labelling was desired by the majority of consumers, it would probably command wide public support. The principles at stake are not complex but their implementation is. Securing a consensus is complicated by the fact that producers have an interest in exaggerating the difficulty of complying with new regulations and pressure groups have an opposite interest in exaggerating the public demand for them. Such questions about where the balance of burden and benefit is to be struck are the subject of everyday political debate.
1.21 A further issue of justice discussed in several parts of the report is whether the larger seed and agrochemical companies possess excessive market power in relation to new entrants to the market, researchers, consumers and the unorganised businesses and consumers of the developing world. The cost of developing new products may inevitably be such that only substantial enterprises will have the resources to undertake it. Large companies naturally carry out research that is in their interests and gives them an advantage over their competitors. They also acquire patents in order to protect their technology and products. There may also be clear advantage to a few large companies to pursue a degree of vertical integration so as to tie in both their customers and their own suppliers. The significance of these concerns is of course contingent on the extent to which such imbalances of power exist. If non-GM seeds continue to offer advantages to farmers that are unmatched by GM seeds, the problem may not be acute. However, in some parts of the world such as the US, it seems likely that almost all the best varieties of the major crops will be genetically modified within ten years. If poorer countries are excluded from adopting GM seeds, their cash crops may become uneconomic and their domestic food supplies may be deprived of potential improvements. The gap between rich and poor might grow.
1.22 Complex questions about justice are also raised by two generally neglected aspects of the problems posed by GM crops. The first is whether the benefits of GM-based farming will be directed towards those to whom they will do the most good. This is certainly a question to debate within developed societies but, more importantly, it is a question about fairness between the richer and poorer societies. So far, the initial benefits of GM crops have largely accrued to some of the seed and agrochemical companies, US farmers and US food producers. Farmers who use less herbicide and insecticide will benefit from reduced costs; and those companies who market both seeds and herbicides will increase their returns.
1.23 Benefits to consumers are harder to find. GM tomatoes that can be processed more efficiently to produce cheaper tomato paste have been readily accepted by UK consumers. (6) Apart from this example, however, little has happened to persuade the consumer that the quality of food will be enhanced in more sophisticated ways or that it will become cheaper. Since these are the two things that most affect consumers, GM crops are currently vulnerable to questions about their real usefulness and to questions about who benefits.
1.24 More important and yet frequently under-emphasised, is the disparity between the developed and the developing world in the effort they devote to agriculture. The prospect of a second Green Revolution, which extends the benefits of the first Green Revolution (7) to crops and areas so far unaffected, is an immensely attractive one. Improved crops in the developing world would create productive work and provide cheaper and more reliable food locally, reduce mortality and malnourishment, and perhaps assist development in other ways. Can these hopes be taken seriously while research, development and the commercial introduction of GM crops are focused almost exclusively on the needs of industrialised agriculture in the developed world? Failure to answer such questions would be a failure to take justice seriously.
1.25 If GM crops are developed to benefit less-developed areas, they will have an impact on the kind of farming practised. Many of those who responded to our consultation have suggested that farmers in the less-developed world practise viable ways of farming that it would be unethical to disrupt. If the impact were disruptive, it would raise the question whether the gains of future producers and consumers amounted to just recompense for whatever disruption occurs. There are two things to be said about such a question. The first is that any disruption would not stem from the fact that the new crops were genetically modified but from other features, such as altered farming patterns. As we show in Chapter 4, GM crops would in fact tend to create more work, but innovation inevitably produces changes which some people find disruptive. The second point is that if the reality of farming in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere is that yields are declining and the present way of life is increasingly unsustainable, there is less to question about the morality of adopting better yielding GM crop varieties. If, however, GM crops are adopted but later found to be harmful or have consequences that can only be righted by substantial investment, poorer countries might be substantially disadvantaged.
1.26 The problem of justice needs to be considered in the context in which general agricultural productivity, and therefore general welfare, is raised but where some people benefit and others do not benefit or even lose. One idea here that has been popular among economists concerned with the ethical appraisal of technical change is that of Pareto optimality (named after its original formulator, Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian economist). A situation is defined as Pareto-optimal when nobody can be made better off without making someone else worse off. If a technical change, like the introduction of GM technology, can be introduced such that productivity can be raised so that everyone is better off, then from an economic viewpoint, it should be introduced. A Pareto-optimal improvement would have been achieved.
1.27 However, there are few cases of technical change which produce an unambiguous all-round improvement in the welfare of everyone who is affected, without making someone worse off. Usually technological innovation produces some gains and some losses, and there is no reason to think that GM technology is likely to be any different. How might the justice of the change be assessed in this common type of situation? Economists have extended the notion of Pareto optimality to develop the concept of the ‘compensation test’. The new situation is better than the previous situation if the ‘winners’ can compensate the ‘losers’, and still have something left over. There is some tension between the economist and the ordinary person however. Most people think that the fact that the winners could compensate the losers is not decisive, and that a change is unequivocally an improvement only if the winners do compensate the losers. Where the winners gain greatly, but there is no way of compensating the losers, our intuitions about whether the situation is an improvement are affected by the relative prosperity and misery of the winners and losers. The terms of trade may change in such a way that a rich person can buy a second Rolls Royce while a hungry person in Zambia becomes hungrier. It is clear that if some of the rich person’s gain could be transferred, the poor person would be very much better off; if it cannot, it is not obvious how we can compare the relative losses and gains. The relevance of this thought is that when we ask consumers in prosperous countries to suppress their doubts about GM crops so that research relevant to the developing world is continued and encouraged, we are asking them to agree that their losses are smaller than the gains of the poor, even though there is no obvious way in which that sum can be done. This may be right, but it relies on our everyday intuitions about justice, not on ideas about economic optimisation that economists can help us with.
1.28 A last question about rights and fairness concerns responsibility for the consequences of GM crop introduction. Consider the possibility that the introduction of GM oilseed rape alters the environment, as compared with current agricultural practice. Who is to be held responsible? If such crops were to be prohibited, who is to bear the burden of doing without them? Between the scientist's laboratory and the altered environment lie many steps. If the scientist had not done the research, no company could have applied it. If the company had not developed it, no trials could have been held; without trials, no plantings by farmers could have taken place, and so on. Yet it has generally been accepted that the scientist had the right to do the research because any remote effects were indeed remote. We normally take the view that it is not the originators of the technology who are responsible, but those who seek to develop and implement it.
1.29 Should responsibility be allocated differently? Who is most responsible? The scientist, the development company, the government committee that approves field trials, the commercial seed company or the purchasing farmer? The temptation to pass responsibility up or down the line to someone else is not always unreasonable. The producer is not usually held to account for the misuse of the product. The scientist would not, in general, be held responsible for the misbehaviour of farmers. However, a scientist or entrepreneur who put into circulation hazardous materials of whose dangers he was fully aware would be blamed for doing so. Where a product cannot be used 'properly', we blame the producer along with the user. There is no obvious solution to such problems about the allocation of responsibility, but their existence places another burden on governments and regulators.
1.30 The ethics of developing and growing GM crops has been our central concern. But we have also been led to reflect on the ethical standards that ought to govern the debate, in particular the need for participants in the debate to be careful about verifying facts and restrained about both optimistic and pessimistic speculation. The views expressed to us by many of the consultation respondents (8) and by those who talked to us directly (9) made it clear how hard it has been for ordinary people to obtain an agreed view of the facts about GM crops. Many respondents were concerned with the hypothetical condition of a world in which GM crops dominated agriculture. Others pointed out that despite the rapid uptake of soya, maize and cotton in the US, GM crops were not expected to make much headway in the UK for at least five years. The fact that Monsanto supplies only three percent of the world's seed (10) belies the image of a new industrial revolution sweeping through agriculture under the impetus of a few multinationals. A well-informed consensus on the facts would resolve some of the arguments and reduce some of the public unease.
1.31 Whose responsibility is it to secure such a consensus, and what are the ethics of public discussion? We say more in Chapter 8 about the need for an advisory committee to focus public discussion and enlighten policy. Meanwhile it is clearly deplorable, both on simple utilitarian grounds, and in terms of the violation of the public's right to be informed, for pressure groups, journalists, commercial concerns or others to put into circulation exaggerated accounts of what can be expected from GM crops. It would have been hard in recent months for anyone to discover from newspaper reports how GM crops were supposed to benefit or harm consumers or the environment. There are unknown dangers in all areas of human endeavour, but the debate on GM crops has too often appealed to hysteria and vested interests.
Footnotes6 The University of Reading National Centre for Biotechnology Education (http://www.ncbe.reading.ac.uk) has an account of the origins and introduction of the new tomato.
7 For a discussion of the Green Revolution, see paragraph 4.4.
8 Appendix 4 summarises the views expressed by respondents to the Working Party's Consultation.
9 See Appendix 3.
10 Merritt C and Walters S (1999) Personal communication, Monsanto plc (CM) and Monsanto Europe SA (SW).